New Tech Drives $11,000 Set Landing Later This Year

The good news? Toshiba has jumped into the deep end of 3D TV technology, announcing a 55-inch LCD screen that uses face-tracking to deliver a 3D picture based on the position of viewers in the room – no glasses required. The bad news? When it comes out later this year, it'll run €7,999 (or about $11,400). So far the announcement seems to be official only for Germany, but it seems likely that other territories will be included in the roll-out.
According to a German-language press release issued by Toshiba yesterday, on the eve of the IFA trade show in Berlin, the 55ZL2G set has a screen resolution of 3840×2160 pixels, which Toshiba is calling “Quad Full HD” because it provides four times the pixel resolution of 1920×1080 HD. That resolution is important, presumably, to maintain picture quality when different images are being presented to several different positions throughout a given viewing room.

Toshiba says miniature lenses mounted on the display’s front (it doesn’t specify how many) are used to direct appropriate images to the left and right eyes of up to nine viewers at different positions in the room, as detected by an integrated camera. The image is driven by a new processing system called CEVO-ENGINE, which calculates the appropriate 3D perspectives and also upconverts flat HD content to the screen’s native resolution, which approaches 4K. But Toshiba did not specify the screen’s refresh rate, and it’s not clear how much the resolution of each of the individual images that make up the multiple 3D perspectives may be compromised.

Lots of news reports on the web are covering the announcement, but there don’t seem to be as many eyewitness reports of how well the technology works. (A reporter at pcmag.com claims to be unimpressed, calling her experience viewing the TV on the show floor “pretty underwhelming.”) Keep an eye out for more of those – if 3D is destined to become a mainstream phenomenon in the living room, this is our first good look at the technology that will make it happen.

For more information: de.press.toshiba.eu.